| (I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.) It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy. If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions. So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it". As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...) |
And one way to determine if some copyrighted content has value is to pirate it and consume it. It's the very same than me going to a friend's house, watching a movie and buying it afterwards because I liked it.
Then you realize that your pirated copy plays without all the trouble of the DRM copy and you stop buying content altogether, which would cost more because of DRM anyways. People don't like being controlled and will always work very, very hard around this. The more someone is able to think critically for oneself, the least they like being controlled.
The fact that a large portion of today's content is created solely for the purpose of making profits certainly doesn't help. I'm pretty sure if we fired everyone supporting DRM and used their resources to create quality content instead, the problem would simply fade away.
Some of the games I previously bought were impossible to play with DRM; either they refused to start because I had a virtual disc emulator installed (to read linux images, of course!) or the DRM checks made the game slow. Getting the pirated copy gave me a much simpler installation process, no complains about my virtual disc emulator and no performance drops whatsoever.
In the end, DRM really is an anti-pattern.